Articles tagged with: older gays

Avery would cut through the bottom left corner of the park, to get to a Q-train at 57th Street and eventually home to Brooklyn. Though his iPod had died on the way uptown, he kept the earphones in, only listening to his own muffled footsteps. Each passing lamp post kept him from being swallowed by the black that such a moonless night provided.

Most of the people in my bioanthropology class cried when narrator Glenn Close told us about the death of the Olive Baboon matriarch. She’d been a bitch for most of the documentary (the alpha female, not Glenn Close), stealing food from subordinate troupe members, recklessly tossing around baboon infants, and generally devastating our naive leftist fantasies of a cuddly, egalitarian primatological ideal. It wasn’t for her sake, then, that eyes were moistened, but for the rest of the baboon society. Olive baboons, by a cruel Darwinian twist of fate, are incapable of cultural continuity across generations—the accumulated knowledge of a group is stored in the brain of the leader, serves the needs of the group for a time, and evaporates when that brain stops buzzing. The fallout was hard to watch. Vultures tore apart unprotected babies, young males tore apart each other, older females forgot how to tear apart pieces of fruit—all because the baboon queen died, her practical wisdom scattered across the savannah like so many hyena-gnawed bones.

On an evening last month that involved at least as much tearing and gnawing and probably even more body hair, it struck me that we queers are not so different.